


1973

by lunicole



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, French Indochina, Horror, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Supernatural Elements, Vietnam War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-19
Updated: 2019-06-19
Packaged: 2020-05-14 22:43:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19282708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lunicole/pseuds/lunicole
Summary: The rain season comes and the rain season goes. That is the way of the stars, the moon, and the monsoon that has been there for millennia before Yixing's time. Yixing obeys their laws, because this is the pact his kin has made with the rains. He's not allowed to go down to the valley without the monsoon. It is the law. The law has been there for so long, even before they started calling this place Vietnam.





	1973

**Author's Note:**

> **Prompt Petal:** #180  
>  **Author's Note:** I'm not fully satisfied with this one, I'll admit it, but I had fun playing around with the themes and the setting. Thanks to the prompter for the idea, and the mods for setting up the fest!

The rain season comes and the rain season goes. That is the way of the stars, the moon, and the monsoon that has been there for millennia before Yixing's time. Yixing obeys their laws, because this is the pact his kin has made with the rains. He's not allowed to go down to the valley without the monsoon. It is the law. The law has been there for so long, even before they started calling this place Vietnam.

 

He's been here for some time. His people have lived in the forest for years, way before the Chinese, the French and the others. Way before this place was even governed by emperors, by kings of rice fields down in the valleys. It's changed names many times, but Yixing has only ever called it home. It is home. No matter what.

 

Yixing's people, they speak an old language, have old customs. Sometimes, people from the valleys fear them, because they're different, but they shouldn't. Yixing would never hurt a fly, especially not now that he knows he's the only one left of his family.

 

Well. He's not sure if he's the only one left, if he's to be perfectly honest. His grandfather spoke of others, living in the mountains, connected to the spirits that inhabited the trees, the skies, the dead bodies of their ancestors, the yet to be born bodies of their descendents. It's the fact that they have the Gift that makes them so special. Yixing has never seen anyone that could do the thing his family could do, still.

 

It doesn't matter, because Yixing, even if he's alone during the dry season, has the monsoon to come down to the valley.

 

*

 

They have their first rain when Yixing is tending the garden. Vegetables he can prepare, herbs he mixes into his remedies, fruits to slice and leave to the altar of his ancestors. They’ll be ready for harvesting soon.

 

He looks at the sky and laughs as it pours down, before running to take cover. He knows it’s a monsoon rain just from the smell. They have this earthy quality that he can’t miss. It's rebirth, and he smiles, smiles, smiles, so hard his face hurts.

 

He's free now. He's free to go down to the valley. He's allowed to take part in the world until the dry season comes again.

 

Yixing gets dressed in his most elegant clothes on his first day down the mountain. They're regal clothes. Red and gold, a bit worn, he has to admit, but regal still.

 

He can’t wait to see the people from the valley again. They’d been worried about what the future might bring them, what tomorrow might look like. Yixing had sworn to pray for them, to make offerings to the spirits of his ancestors, all the way up in the mountain. He hopes his prayers have been answered.

 

*

 

The forest is quiet when he first gets to the village. He's been there last year. There had been a few families, smiling faces, warm soup to welcome him. The people from this village, they'd been kind to his people. They'd been there for a long time, and they'd understood the importance of cultivating the bond between the valley and the mountain.

 

Yixing had healed a few children the last time he'd been there, few growing pains, a blind baby with a strange malformation to his face. He hadn't been the first child like this Yixing had seen, but in the past few years, children with birth defects had become more frequent. There was little Yixing could do about these things, but the fact that he sat down and talked with the mother seemed to help, in its own way.

 

The forest is quiet and it's ominous, as Yixing comes to the village and finds it empty. They've left. The valley people, the ones that had been here for such a long time, they're gone. Maybe it’s the war. Foreign armies marching over the jungle. But it’s not the first time there’s been a war here, yet this… This feels different.

 

Yixing wanders about, wonders what happened. He'd heard a few hushered words the last time he'd come here about things that took place in the cities, more foreigners coming to fight over the land for things Yixing never quite properly understood. Something about the French again, he imagines, something about those terrible, terrible wars he'd only ever seen the returning soldiers of.

 

When Yixing was a child, his father would come to see an old, battered man with a missing leg with every rain season. The man was always drunk, always reeked, but it wasn't for the smell that Yixing father was here to heal him. It was for the nightmares, about fights over patches of land so desolated flowers had stopped growing over battered mud, all the way up north, where the French came from, where sometimes the weather got so cold ice would cover the dead bodies over the battlefield.

 

The village is deserted, Yixing realises as he enters the empty house of what used to the the most skilled seamstress of the valley. Her sewing supplies are a mess, now, left behind, ashtray. Yixing wonders what happened for her to leave them here like this.

 

*

 

The estate has been vacated years ago, but somehow it hasn't been fully destroyed, neither by the invaders nor by the resentment of the local workers that shed blood, sweat and tears in the hevea plantation. Grass grows wild around ancient dirt roads, upon which expensive european cars used to travel to get to the mansion.

 

It's because most people believe the place to be haunted, cursed by the spirits of the ones that worked themselves to death in those fields. It makes sense, to Yixing, but it's not the case, at least he's never sensed any threat coming from the earth here.

 

It's sometimes hard to understand, how the valley people see the world that surrounds them, the world of the material and the world of the spirits. Yixing figures out it's normal. None of them are like him. None of them see the things Yixing can see.

 

The planters had made a quick escape, Yixing remembers. Sometimes, he finds himself missing them, not for the misery they brought, but for the strange charm their exotic customs had. Wine and expensive imported foods. Clothing that made no sense in the suffocating, wet heat of Cochinchina. Foreign vowels that slipped over their tongue in a strange composition.

 

Yixing makes a point of coming here every time he comes down from his mountain. It's for the ritual, to honour the dead the valley people erected a small shrine too, over the abandoned rubber plantation where so many died.

 

It's a bit different, now. Now he feels like he has no choice. The other villages he usually visits are empty too, just as desolated as this place. Somehow, he feels like the old plantation holds the answers he's searching for.

 

Maybe there's something here. Maybe Yixing can find out what happened to the valley when the dry season had kept him in the mountain, away from the world.

 

*

 

The answer to this comes to Yixing, at first, with the static noise of a broken radio and a smell that, as a healer, he recognises too well. Blood.

 

The sound gets louder as he walks through the sprawling corridors of the old estate. The elaborately printed wallpaper is falling off the molding walls of the former colonial mansion. Outside, the rain is pouring, down, down, down.

 

He makes his presence known the usual way he does these things, by ringing the bell he keeps on his belt when he enters new villages to heal the sick and help bury the dead. The sound has the radio fall silent, but the smell of blood is still there.

 

Yixing frowns.

 

Carefully, he walks closer to the door he knows the noise was coming from. His feet brush softly against the battered wood floor of the abandoned mansion.

 

As he's about to come in, there's a shot from a gun. Then another.

 

Yixing has always been too lucky for his own good. His mother used to tell him so. He's couched on the ground for cover, and he fears what is about to come, another bullet, maybe.

 

But nothing comes. For a few long moments, Yixing can only hear his own panicked heartbeat in his ears. But once the ringing dissipates, suddenly it hits him.

 

The clicking sound of an empty cartridge. A curse in a language Yixing doesn't recognise.

 

Then, Yixing can raise his head, can look. There's a radio alright, and there's a man, too, sitting next to it. His chest bandaged crudely, clutching the weapon uselessly. There's blood dirtying the cloth that needs to be cleaned and covered.

 

*

 

"You're not from around here, are you?" Yixing asks softly, looking at the soldier.

 

It is a soldier, he wasn't mistaken, but it's a different type of soldier than the ones he's seen in the past. It's the uniform, he hasn't seen any like this before, and his face too.

 

Not Japanese, but almost, probably. Yixing hopes he's not Japanese, too, so maybe it's wishful thinking on his part. The Japanese hadn't been kind to the people of the valley the last time they'd been here. Yixing prayed the spirits of his ancestors for them never to come back. He hopes his prayers have been answered.

 

The soldier doesn't speak his language, not very well anyway, and so Yixing tries speaking slowly. He's young, far younger than a man sent to war should be, but it's not the first time Yixing has seen boys hardly old enough to old a weapon around these parts.

 

Yixing fixes his bandages, because this is what he does, as a healer, and the soldier doesn't seem to enjoy his care, but can't escape it either. He's badly injured, and Yixing suspects that it's through sheer willpower that this man isn't laying dead there. He's reminded of the old alcoholic his father used to treat, all of a sudden. The memory feels painful.

 

They don't seem to be able to communicate well enough for Yixing to ask how the soldier got here, where he's from and what happened to him. Yet, there's a question the soldier manages to understand, a heavy accent on his lips as he answers.

 

"What's your name?" Yixing asks, once he managed to explain through various gestures for the soldier to stay still and let him take care of him.

 

The soldier blink.

 

"Baekhyun," he says, and it is a foreign name, a foreign accent. "Byun Baekhyun."

 

*

 

Yixing is forced to stay. He can't leave, not now anyway. The soldier, Byun Baekhyun, is the first person he's seen ever since the start of the rain season, and he's injured. Yixing is a healer. He has to care for the injured. He has to care for him.

 

It's difficult to find a place in the dilapidated estate that's safe enough for Yixing to set up camp. He picks the former kitchens. There's a few pots and pans there that he finds hidden, and it's not too hard to start a fire in what used to be a the center of the plantation. There's a few covers he can use to make a bed for the injured soldiers in the heavy bag he carries with him when he comes down from the mountain. Yixing will have to sleep on the floor tonight, but it's okay, he figures.

 

“Where are you from?” Yixing asks as he starts cooking their evening meal.

 

There is no reply from the soldier, Baekhyun, but Yixing knows it’s normal. He gives his bandages a quick check, making sure they’re properly set for healing. They have rice and vegetables, something simple, filling, tea and dried meats Yixing prepared during the winter.

 

When Yixing offers the soldier food, there’s this apprehension in the other’s eyes, but he’s quick to take it still. He must be starved. He’s so thin, floating in his uniform. Yixing feeds him, not unlike the way he’s been taught to feed injured birds, making sure he doesn’t choke on the rice porridge.

 

Yixing talks to him, and the soldier seems to catch a few glimpses of what he means. It is like taking care of an injured bird, too, making sure his voice is soothing, non-threatening. He tells him about the mountain where he lives, how he’s spent the winter up there. He tells him about the new family of monkeys he’s taken a liking to on his morning walks around the forest over the past season. 

 

“Korea,” the soldiers says at some point. Yixing doesn’t really know where Korea is, but he nods, and smiles.

 

He tells him he’ll spend the night here, just to be sure. He tells him he doesn’t have to be alone anymore. The soldier, Byun Baekhyun, doesn’t understand him, but it’s fine, he figures. Yixing needs this just as much as the wound over the man’s chest needs tending.

 

*

 

Yixing is in a forest again that night, and this forest isn’t his forest, he feels it. He’s learnt to navigate dreams as a child, and it easy to figure out that this isn’t his own dream. The air is different, heavier, and he knows something terrible happened just from the way the leaves moves in the branches over his head. 

 

He has to go, and so he runs. There’s a clearing not too far away, and feels relief as he sees the soldier standing in the middle of it, eyes towards the sky. He’s crying.

 

“Are you okay?” Yixing tries to say, but the words sound weird on his tongue, foreign.

 

The soldier turns to him, and there’s something terrible in the way his pupils dilate upon looking at the healer. Yixing can’t pinpoint what it is.

 

“I’m so sorry.,” he speaks in the timeless language of dreams. “I’ve done terrible things.”

 

The ground shifts underneath his feet. He’s falling, now, down, down, down.

 

*

 

Yixing wakes up to the sound of the soldier screaming. He’s thrashing around in the covers Yixing wrapped him into, fighting something invisible, something Yixing can’t see.

 

It takes Yixing holding him down, the way his father would hold down some of the valley people that were taken with diseases of the mind the plants and herbs never managed to fully heal. It’s to keep him from hurting himself. The soldier tries to kick him off, but he’s too weak to overpower Yixing who’s managed to rest a full season before coming down the mountain.

 

Eyes shoot open. There’s something wild, restless in them. Something savage. Yixing is reminded, briefly, of a trapped beast. Breath comes in and out raggedly, but it settles, soon enough.

 

The soldier’s hands are on his forearms, holding onto him as much as they’re weakly trying to push back. They’re delicate, almost too much for someone he knows killed for a living, maybe here, maybe somewhere else. Yixing presses back, but it doesn’t need to be as forceful this time.

 

The soldier mutters something in a language Yixing doesn’t understand. Then, he corrects himself, shaky Vietnamese on his lips once more.

 

“Sorry. Sorry…”

 

Delicate hands come to hold Yixing’s, and they’re cool against his skin, still febrile from the nightmare. Yixing doesn’t ask if the soldier remembers the forest, or the smell of blood that permeated everything in that horrible, horrible place.

 

They go back to sleep, rain trickling down the battered roof of the abandoned mansion. There’s thunder, too, and Yixing doesn’t shrug the soldier’s hand away as it reaches for his fingers, holding there, grounding himself with all he’s got.

 

*

 

They make a deal, in the strange miming rudimentary language they manage to communicate with, or at least Yixing thinks so. It’s not hard, to convince the soldier to stay here, in the former plantation, where there’s shelter and food Yixing promises he’ll be bringing to him regularly. 

 

It’s not hard to see that neither of them have anywhere else to go, but still it feels weird to leave. When Yixing gets ready to go back up the hike up the mountain, leaving the soldier with necessities, he gestures and explains how to keep the wound clean to avoid infection, how change the bandages, if anything happens.

 

The rain stops as if to bid him to go. He looks at the soldier, tries to pronounce his name. It’s what healing is, his father had taught him. The body and the soul, all in one, they have to maintain this balance, this equilibrium. 

 

There are wounds within the soul herbs and ointments can’t heal. Yixing’s seen them, in the soldier’s dreams. He wonders if the soldier remembers any of it, understands it. Does he come from a place where fantasy and reality are neatly separated, divided the way this plantation was divided between the landlords and the workers? Yixing can’t know.

 

What he knows is that this man looks like he hasn’t heard his own name in a long time. That’s the reason why Yixing does this.

 

“See you, Baekhyun,” he bows.

 

The soldier looks at him, and, faintly, smiles.

 

*

 

The days go by. Yixing can’t speak the soldier’s language, and the soldier hardly speaks Yixing’s tongue. They make do, during the days that trickle by as Yixing comes to take care of his wound.

 

They meet in dreams, too, but Yixing isn’t sure the soldier remembers those dreams the way Yixing does. It’s one of his gifts that are hard to explain, even more so when there’s a language barrier between them in their waking hours.

 

He knows Baekhyun had a family, in what seems like another life. There’s a brother he sees in the dreams, sometimes, and a country that is so far away from Yixing’s mountain. He knows Baekhyun sometimes walks in his childhood home in his dreams, sings in a voice that’s gorgeous in a way that makes Yixing weak in his knees as he watches. There are recitals on stages that Yixing doesn’t recognises, music, music, music.

 

Sometimes, they speak, too, in Baekhyun’s dreams. One time, they’re sitting in a place Yixing doesn’t recognise, and there’s icy little flecks of ice falling down the sky. Yixing’s worried about what it might be, if this can hurt him, but Baekhyun just laughs. It’s snow, he understands, now. There’s a lot of it, in the winter, in the soldier’s homeland, where there’s no rain and dry season, and where sometimes it gets so cold the lakes ice over.

 

Baekhyun shows him how to take the snow between his hands, in the dream, and it feels weird, how cold it is under his touch. Then, he feels a ball of the same snow hit him in the head. Yixing stays shocked, for a few moments, Baekhyun grinning at him in the unnamed winter forest they’re standing in. Then he looks at the snowball in his hands, then back at the soldier, and understands.

 

It’s not long before they’re throwing snowballs at each other, and Yixing laughs, more than he has laughed in decades, his heart beating wildly in his chest and his face split in a sharp smile.

 

When he wakes up that morning, alone in his hut in the mountain, Yixing can’t help but to feel cold despite the warm heat of the rain season.

 

*

 

Weeks go by. The soldier doesn’t leave, and he tinkers with the radio sometimes still. They’ve developed this quiet way of understanding each other, when Yixing feeds Baekhyun, berry fruits he picks up in the forest, vegetables from his garden, sweet and fresh like summer, like the moonsoon.

 

Yixing wonders why the soldier hasn’t left, briefly, at times, but he never dwells on it very long. He’s glad he’s got someone to take care of. He’s glad he’s found someone to heal.

 

Yixing feeds him, sings him stories in a soft voice that doesn’t need words to be understood as calming. 

 

The monsoon showers outside in brief, intense rains, making the entire estate smell like drenched earth. They watch in silence. Sometimes, the soldier looks at him with wide eyes when he thinks Yixing can’t see him.

 

He’s seen those eyes before. He knows what they mean. There had been a boy, years ago, that would come bring flowers to a dying girl Yixing was taking care of every day, who had had the same look for her. The girl had died. It had been found out that the boy had been poisoning her slowly, for years, until he’d also opted to drown himself in the river.

 

It’s desire, and fear, and something else, Yixing knows. What he’s not exactly sure of is the meaning of it all.

 

*

 

There’s an old story that Yixing finds himself singing to the soldier one night. He doesn’t know why he sings this one, that night. Maybe it’s because it sounds right, with the moon shining above their heads, and the knowledge Yixing has that they’re the only ones in the valley, empty villages for miles around.

 

It’s a ghost story, about the walls that surround them, the abandoned plantation, and the French masters that ruled it. It’s the story of the beast, the one that had crossed oceans, from the faraway country side of a place called Gevaudan.

 

It starts with a businessman greedy for the money that came with setting up a plantation in the valley, money coming from the rubber mills. The rule of the Frenchman over the hevea plantation is harsh, cruel, the way these plantations always were, eating the people up and turning up automobiles and rubber tires out of their blood, sweat and tears. There had been legends, about the white man’s nightly outings under the skin of a wolf, about the people that disappeared, their bodies never to be found.

 

The soldier can’t understand, but somehow there’s something in his eyes that shies away from Yixing’s gaze as the healer sings. Then, a soft moan of pain, making Yixing stop, check his bandages.

 

There’s blood there, fresh, and it seems like Baekhyun broke something in the stitching Yixing did by moving around. It’s fine. Yixing can fix it. Yixing will fix it, the same way he will fix the soldier, heal him, because this is what he does, until he’s fine, until he can leave.

 

He doesn’t see the dark look in Baekhyun’s eyes as he looks away, out the broken window of the abandoned plantation master bedroom, out in the sea of hevea trees that surround the mansion.

 

*

 

Some nights, he finds himself back in the soldier’s dreams, and they talk. Some nights, the dreams are happy. There’s music and places Yixing has never seen. Snow, large amounts of it, far more than anything Yixing will ever in his life. The sea, too, sometimes. It’s beautiful, or perhaps it’s Baekhyun’s memories that paint such a gorgeous faraway land. Yixing can’t know.

 

He learns more about Baekhyun through the glimpses he sees of what seems like another life, far away from here. A brother, a mother. Friends that speak a language that he doesn’t understand. Food that has the spicy taste of meals he knows people up in the north enjoy.

 

He’s glad. It’s because he’s less lonely now that he can navigate the dreams of someone else, maybe. He hasn’t done this in awhile, because he hasn’t needed to. There was reality for him, the solid ground underneath his feet, the melodious sounds of voices thanking him for doing what has been his family’s duty for generations.

 

The villages of the valley have disappeared. Wiped away. Yixing has searched for the villagers, the ones he’d seen during the previous rain season, but he hasn’t found anyone. None of the houses have been destroyed, but they stand, empty and ominous, when he walks through deserted dirt roads on his way to the plantation.

 

He tries not to think to hard about what it all means, and fails.

 

*

 

“The full moon will come soon,” Baekhyun tells Yixing in their dream, one night, in that strange language they manage to understand each other through when Yixing walks into Baekhyun’s dreams.

 

They’re sitting in the house of the soldier’s childhood memories, and the evening is quiet. It’s gorgeous, the moon and the stars, and it makes Yixing smile softly. It’s gorgeous. He’s glad Baekhyun dreams such beautiful things. He’s glad he gets to see them.

 

“Yes,” Yixing nods. “Perfect time for harvesting medicinal plants.”

 

Baekhyun shakes his head, something sour in his expression even though everything is still so beautiful around them. Suddenly the dream shifts to night, and the moon rises over them. It’s beautiful, like most of the soldier’s dreams. They sit in silence, watch it shine in the night sky of that faraway land Baekhyun comes from. Then, without a warning, tears fall down the soldier’s cheek, until they’re not just tears, small sobs, broken whimpers.

 

Yixing wants to prod, but he doesn’t, not yet. He likes taking care Baekhyun, maybe because he’s the only one left to like and care for in the valley, and he doesn’t want to push him away, not yet, not when the rain season still allows him to come down here.

 

He doesn’t ask questions, holds the soldier, presses kisses on his forehead, because he can’t help himself, even if he shouldn’t be doing this, not now, not ever.

 

It’s the curse of his people, Yixing thinks as he wakes up, gets ready for the day, tending to the garden, the same way he tends to people as a healer, with love and care and meaning. They come and go with the monsoon, with the rains of summer, have done for generations. They come and go when the people of the valley need them, and now, well… Now there’s only one person left in the valley, one person that Yixing doesn’t want to let go of, for better or worse.

 

*

 

Yixing doesn't expect this dream to be set here. They're in the plantations, the hevea trees surrounding them with dark, heavy shadows, rubber sap trickling from deep cuts within the bark. It's night, full moon over their heads, and Yixing can hear the ground weep softly. 

 

It's pain. Something terrible happened here, or is about to happen, Yixing can't be sure. He can feel it in the air. It's his father that showed him how, when he was a child, when he'd been brought along for the first time to a battlefield, when he'd seen the kind of pain men could inflict upon one another.

 

He walks between the rows of trees, threading carefully as all healers who dare to walk dreams should. He's looking for the soldier. He's looking for Baekhyun.

 

He finds him, but it's not him, not quite.

It's a beast, the same that walked through the valley years ago, the beast that came from far away and ate whole villages alive. An enormous body, like the one of a wolf the size of an elephant, a maw powerful enough to crush a man's skull, teeth sharp, dangerous, stands among the gently swaying trees. The worst isn't the scars over its fur, or the fresh, open wound that supuring on its chest.

 

The worst are its eyes, the rage and despair in them, red like blood, like death. Still Yixing recognizes him, recognizes Baekhyun, just like that planter that came here all those years ago, in the wet heat of southern Vietnam, and fell victim to his own demons.

 

This is what war looks like, men turning into beasts. Unforgiving summers burning up the valley like wildfire have taken people in the past, and they'll keep doing so, because healers like Yixing must heal, just like monsters like Baekhyun must destroy.

 

Yixing is still screaming by the time he wakes up. His heart races. The rain is pouring by the time he arrives to the abandoned plantation, but he doesn't care. He has to see. He has to find.

 

It's useless, however, as he can only find the radio playing, and Baekhyun, the soldier, is gone.

 

*


End file.
